Social media finally took center stage for a Super Bowl, so let’s see what was good, and bad, about the effort.
The Social Media Command Center was the first of its kind and set up by the Indianapolis Super Bowl Host Committee. But it was more for monitoring than for publication. The YouTube channel, called Superbowl 2012, has only six videos (as of this blog post) to account for a two week period of activities.
The Indianapolis Super Bowl Host Committee Flickr account has zero – that’s right, no – photos on it, as of this writing. The overall Super Bowl social media program was set up more for response than for publication, and while that’s fine, social media’s more than something used for defensive actions. It’s used to publish, too.
The problem is a focus that’s entirely on Twitter and Facebook, and on Twitter tweets. That’s only one aspect of social media, and really is more social network monitoring than social media. Advertisers got into the Twitter-happy fray with their own Twitter campaigns and hashtags.
As for the most popular Super Bowl Commercial, according to data recorded on Twitscoop, it’s for the car maker Hyundai.
Twitscoop presents this cloud of popular terms under “commercial,” which was one of the past week’s most popular trends, and under that cloud one brand name popped up for: Hyundai. From the info, Hyundai had two commercials that rang with audiences, most notably the “Cheetah” segment, where a cheetah on the loose skips racing a Hyundai car, and chases after the man who released it from its cage. Check it out:
Overall, the good is that a social media effort was done at all. It speaks to the rise of the platforms that allow social media to be done, and to the public’s fast adoption of them. But the bad is in the execution of social media efforts: they’re defensive; offensive strategies, like blogging, and overall content publishing, are forgotten. Thus, there’s only a partial return on the social media investment.
What the Indianapolis Super Bowl Host Committee should have done is had a sponsored blogger / video-blogger lounge and set up a special access passes for bloggers, and contests for the bloggers with the most content. The result would be a way of giving online viewers a real idea of what is happening around town, and what celebs are flying around, and really install a good feel for what it’s like – or now was like – to be there.
Such an effort can provide sponsors with a real concrete place to have their logos shown, and their message sent out. Plus, since bloggers regularly post to Twitter and Facebook, and video-bloggers use YouTube and Blip.tv, the content would have been distributed throughout the social graph for the Indy Super Bowl.
For more on this, catch me on the Tonya Hall Radio Show here:
http://www.tonyahall.net/radio.htm
Of course, if you’re reading this and think “I should get Zennie to set all of this up,” please contact me at [email protected] or 510-517-7565.